


A whisper weighed upon the tattered down where you and I were lying

by Onecrazyfangirl



Category: Campaign (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Lucid Dreaming, Trauma, but it does hurt a lot, like a lot, now featuring the child they never had, technically, travis' unresolved feelings to margaret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28456218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Onecrazyfangirl/pseuds/Onecrazyfangirl
Summary: You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.~Richard SikenSometimes Travis dreams and sometimes the happy ones hurt more than any nightmare could.
Relationships: Margaret & Travis Matagot, Margaret/Travis Matagot
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8





	A whisper weighed upon the tattered down where you and I were lying

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to angst central. First of all I would like to blame this on the "Hazards of Love" album by the decemberists, which is where the title is from. Second I blame everyone in the uwuru who gave me so many angst headcanons, love you guys. I also blame Sable for this comic: https://twitter.com/knifepatron/status/1319632819635785729, and based Travis' guilt on it somewhat.
> 
> lastly special thanks to Rowan for editing, couldnt have done it without you. (they are DrowningInStarlight, as always check them out they are really good)

“Should we buy honey, William?” Margaret says, holding up a pot up to him questiongly. 

He blinks, taking in his surroundings. He’s at some sort of market in the central square of a village. His village. The sun is shining high in the sky.

“Sorry?” he says to his wife.

She rolls her eyes, placing the jar in her bag and handing the merchant some money. She smiles though, and still they walk with their arms intertwined.

“You are distracted today,” she says, lightheartedly.

He holds her hand tighter, but smiles. “It’s nothing,” he says, “I’m just thinking.”

She snorts. “Thinking? About what, dear?” she says teasingly. 

He sighs overdramatically. “You always make fun of me, Margaret,” he says, voice full of put upon dramatics, “And here I thought you were supposed to love me unconditionally, or whatever.”

They both burst out laughing, and he feels the background worry and knowledge fade away. They buy the rest of their things and start heading home by the time the darkness starts creeping over the horizon.

As they approach their home, everything is so idyllic it feels wrong. It’s a small house at the edge of a town, surrounded by lush forests, painted some artful colour. There are plants growing gracefully down one side of it.

Travis’ resolve to maintain his faith that this is real wavers as he sees their ridiculous home. It breaks even more as he finds himself opening the door and there’s a kid standing in the hallway. She isn’t a spitting image of her mother, but she has her curly brown hair, neatly put into two puffy ponytails. 

She unmistakably has his eyes.

She smiles and runs towards him, throwing herself into his arms. "Dad!" she says. She can’t be older than five. "You’re home!" 

Her weight is so real in his arms, for a moment Travis lets himself believe and hugs her back. She makes a little noise of delight. Margaret is smiling in the doorway, she stands to kiss her daughter’s head before making her way towards the kitchen.

He wants so very badly to believe this is real. That’s the problem with lucid dreaming, you are always so painfully aware of the unreality around you. But Travis Matagot has spent decades mastering pretending and repressing, and so he smiles and carries his daughter into the kitchen.

"So what are we eating tonight?" he asks.

It doesn’t actually matter what they are eating, it’s something warm and nice and completely devoid of meaning anyway. He hears the meaningless chatter around the table, and he probably joins in. He’s happy to just let this wash over him. He doesn’t eat, but at the end of the meal he finds his plate empty and his belly full anyway.

It's fully dark now, and he knows it’s time to tuck Hope into bed. She wants to be read to and Travis obliges, almost on autopilot. The story is some garbled nonsense and she falls asleep in no time.

Once she’s asleep, he stands there and looks at her, so small, so fragile, so utterly dependent on him. She has that sort of childish devotion too, she loves him, trusts him with everything. It’s terrifying, more than any horrible nightmare he could have. It's almost ironic really, that one of his biggest fears is his own child sleeping safely under his watchful eye.

Margaret leads him out of the room, with some mumbling about sleep. Suddenly Travis feels tired and yawns without meaning to. They get undressed and she climbs into bed in silence. He stares at her for a while, in bed with her hair let down and an expression of satisfied peace on her face. It aches. 

He stares for long until she pats the bed next to her. He slips into the covers and her warmth feels so real. How come he can remember her smell so well? Something like a river bank and spring flowers.

Travis lays his head just under her neck, she plays with his hair and he tries to just not think so much. She's humming a song she wouldn't know because it was composed about thirty years after her death. He hasn't changed, of course. Maybe the Queen doesn't even exist in this corner of his mind.

"You will have to leave," Margaret says abruptly, although not unkindly.

Travis groans. "Maybe I don't," he says and firmly closes his eyes, trying not to see her face.

She lifts his chin up to meet her gaze anyway, and it hurts, fuck, it hurts to see her look at him like this.

"Travis," she says, he flinches, she never would have called him that. "We both know you always wake up eventually."

"We usually don't have a kid." His voice cracks on the end of the sentence.

"It's because you’ve been thinking about it, probably."

He knows this isn't Margaret. She is a thing stitched of memories, of things he saw in her, of the Margaret he has now. 

Partially she's just him, bouncing him thoughts he would like to not examine when he is awake. Today’s Margaret's treatment had helped, of course, but it had opened doors with things behind them Travis had almost managed to forget about.

"Why don't I at least believe it's true," he laments, "Why don't I get to live my perfect world or whatever, at least for like a night?"

"I don’t think that’s what this is," she tells him.

He knows that, but he asks anyway. "What do you think it is, then?"

"You don't actually want to know."

He lays his head back on her chest, listening to the phantom beating of her heart. "I know you’ll tell me anyway."

She hums. Her hands are back in his hair. "I think," she starts, "Partially this is a place you believe you could have ended up, if your mother hadn't died, if your father had been kinder, if the world hadn't ended, if you hadn't walked into that wretched forest."

He vaguely hums in acknowledgement, and for once he doesn't interrupt.

"Maybe then, you would have settled down in a small town, with your wife. You would have wanted and would've gotten a kid. Been a great father."

She trails off, he doesn't look at her.

"I guess," he says. "You said partially?"

"This is what you wish you wanted, too."

He tenses up. "I do want this."

She shakes her head, and even without looking at her he can picture her face clearly, the exasperated fondness mixed with that horrid melancholy.

"We both know that's not true," she says.

There’s a pause. Travis doesn’t know if he's angry or guilty or relieved.

"Come on, Travis," she says, being so very kind, so patient. 

They hadn’t been like this, him and Margaret. They’d been so young, in the grand scheme of things. They’d liked going to bars and beating everybody at Illimat and running small schemes and violating curfew and running from law enforcers. Margaret had been kind to him, but she could bite back just as viciously as he could. It had worked so well. At the time they were both just mildly dysfunctional people, and they’d truly brought out the best in each other. They were reckless and they had gotten married with blood oaths, which people had advised against. They’d been told such things just invite tragedy.

And they had both been so very afraid when Margaret had noticed she was pregnant.

"I remember," Travis said, he could hear the waver in his voice "That you said we should find a Black Lily, or a doctor, or maybe we…" he trailed off, not wanting the tears to spill from his eyes.

"We never got to weigh our options,” Margaret says.

William hadn't wanted children. He was afraid of what he knew you could do to a child, he was afraid of outliving his own kid, he didn't want to give his long dead father the satisfaction. And every single bit of relief he had ever felt about it not being a problem anymore had been met with guilt in a tenfold. 

"We didn't want this," she said, "I didn't want this." Margaret would not have settled for a weirdly perfect life passively weaving and cooking dinners. William would not have coped well either. The two of them had been master con artists and reckless young lovers.

"I wouldn't have left you," he says.

She kisses his hair and murmurs "I know, my love, I know."

Travis Matagot would have left, of course, right at dawn, unable to face any of this. But he knows that William would have tried. William would have stayed and he would have been broken and afraid but he would have stayed and he would have faced it all.

If it had come to that, then he knows they would have been unfit, stumbling parents. It would have been messy and just a bit broken, and they would have found a way, because together they usually had. It wouldn't end in a perfect village with normal jobs and no heartbreak, not even back then.

And then William had died alongside her in the depths of the river.

She smiles like she knows what he's thinking, which she probably does, as she’s nothing more than a shade of his own subconscious.

"We would have made the best of it," she says, "But none of that would have led us here because then you wouldn't be you, and I loved you. Even the parts you believe unlovable, even the ones that led you to be the broken man you are now, and especially the ones that made you yearn for more than this."

They sit in the silence of that, but Travis still doesn't wake up. "There’s more to this, isn't there," he says, sighing. There’s always more to it.

"You don't actually want to go back anymore, and that scares you."

He flinches and sits up angrily. “I don’t know what you mean.”

When she speaks, there’s a bit of the real bite she would have had in her voice. “Yes, you do.”

"I didn't want you to die!" he says. His hands are shaking in his lap. He's crying, trying to focus on a point on the wall, trying to wake up.

"Gable isn't here," she says, "And neither is Jonnit, and you wish you wanted this back, but you have the two of them now."

"I would trade it all to have you back," he says, and his voice comes out so small.

"Oh, Travis," she says, gently placing her hand on his back, "It's alright, you know-"

"Shut up!" he says. He looks at her, her endless patience, the mangled ghost of his wife that isn’t really like her at all.

She slumps against him, hugging him from behind. He turns around and kisses her softly, and he remembers kissing her so vividly this feels almost real.

-

He wakes up in the middle of the night and he knows he's very obviously been crying. He climbs out of what he generously calls his bunk. He needs to get some fresh air, or something.

As he’s walking up to the deck, he bumps into Gable, because of course he does.

"Have you been smoking rope?" they ask, peering at him.

Travis could not be in a worse mood to deal with this. "Yes!" he spits out angrily, the lie coming easily.

"I just asked a question! What did I do this time?" Gable says, exasperated. 

"Nothing," he says and then, "Everything, I don’t fucking know, Gable! Just leave it."

He sees them flinch and he sees the hurt look on their face, and he almost convinces himself he doesn't care.

"What has gotten- Travis? Travis, where are you going?"

He begins stomping off to find a closet where he can curl into a ball in peace. "I said leave it!" he shouts over his shoulder.

They stomp off in the other direction.

-

He does find a corner eventually, and he just sits there. He can't actually bring himself to cry, or even to think. He's stuck on old worn memories and the intense mix of helplessness and guilt. He hates himself and everything for it.

It’s Margaret who finds him.

"Leave," he says, not turning to face her.

"Travis," she says, ignoring him. "We are still tethered together, remember, and you woke me up rather abruptly."

"Well I am so sorry," he says, voice dripping with sarcasm. "Happy now?"

She sighs. "Bad dream?"

"Well, you know," he says, too tired and strung out to stop himself, "About her. And our kid. And you, I guess. A perfect day. Bad dream.”

That makes her pause. "I understand why that would make my presence upsetting, and if you truly want me to leave I will," she says. "But I don't want to leave you here alone, and you won't talk about this to Gable, and you shouldn't dump these sort of things on Jonnit."

She's right. She usually is. He sighs and sits up a little straighter.

"You don't need to look at me, if that helps."

That does make it easier, and he hates that she knows it. "Alright," he says.

"So this dream about something you lost is what upset you?"

"I feel like I just had this conversation, you know."

"You talked to her?" She sounds a little surprised. 

He considers the question. “It wasn't like with Dref, she was just like… a memory." 

Margaret nods. "I can feel you don't want to take me through the whole dream,” she says, sounding both gentle and firm, “But can you maybe tell me what you think is most upsetting to you right now."

"She said some things that I didn’t want to think about."

"Very vague, dear, but it's a start," she says.

So Travis starts explaining. It's halting and abstract and broken up by bitten back sobs but he tries. Tries to explain Margaret, and the life he never got to lead, and the one he never even wanted. About a kid he never had that he still feels guilty towards. About the mangled stitched together thing his dream Margaret was, and how that is all that’s left of her now.

Margaret weaves a spell between them quietly. The moment their connection strengthens, tears begin to fill her eyes, almost involuntarily.

He turns to look at her. Seeing her face is hard and comforting all at once, because nothing in his life is ever allowed to be simple.

“You’re holding onto so much, Travis,” she says, her voice somehow still steady, despite her tears.

Travis can feel she's shouldering his burden of grief and guilt with him. It's nice somehow, to know that she truly understands. In a sick, twisted way, it's nice to know she's struggling under it too.

"I just don't want to lose her,” he whispers.

She pauses to think, and then very carefully says "You’re holding onto all this grief and guilt because you believe it keeps her close, but Travis dear, it only makes it harder for you to think about her, talk about her.” 

She moves forward to hold his hands and his gaze. “You want to be guilty because that makes the pain fair. You want to be in pain because her loss deserves to be felt. You are afraid of being content without it; now and in the future. Which is not letting you be happy with the people you have now, and not letting you think about what you could have."

They’re looking at each other now, and her hands move up to cradle his face ever so sweetly. Travis has nothing to say. He just nods vaguely and feels her tears on her hands.

"I wish I could get rid of it all for you, but it will take work, and you have been bottling it up for so long.” She slowly pulls him closer to her and kisses the top of his forehead. She murmurs, like a small prayer onto his skin, like it's holy, “You need to understand it's okay to let go of her Travis. You love her, so deeply and fully, I can feel that. That will keep her close, that is worth remembering."

He's crying now, and he leans into her and falls into her embrace so easily as the tears finally flow, as he lets himself feel the grief finally, letting it all out. Letting it go. She holds him, sharing the mourning with him. She rubs his back tenderly as he sobs into her chest. She’s got him this time.

A few nights later, he dreams of a river and he's holding Margaret’s hand. He's been through this a million times: sometimes he hopes he will be able to pull them both out, sometimes he hopes to die with her. Neither ever works out, of course.

This time he stops struggling, and looks at her face. Looks at the millions of hands pulling her down, and the current threatening to tear him apart.

It burns in his chest, but he takes a deep breath.

“Goodbye,” he says.

And he lets go of her hand.


End file.
